THERE is a spider crawling along the matted floor of the room where I sit (not the one
which has been so well allegorised in the admirable Lines to a Spider, but another of the
same edifying breed); he runs with heedless, hurried haste, he hobbles awkwardly towards
me, he stops -- he sees the giant shadow before him, and, at a loss whether to retreat or
proceed, meditates his huge foe -- but as I do not start up and seize upon the straggling
caitiff, as he would upon a hapless fly within his toils, he takes heart, and ventures on with
mingled cunning, impudence and fear. As he passes me, I lift up the matting to assist his
escape, am glad to get rid of the unwelcome intruder, and shudder at the recollection after
he is gone. A child, a woman, a clown, or a moralist a century ago, would have crushed
the little reptile to death-my philosophy has got beyond that -- I bear the creature no ill-will, but still I hate the very sight of it. The spirit of malevolence survives the practical exertion of it. We learn to curb our will and keep our overt actions within the bounds of humanity, long before we can subdue our sentiments and imaginations to the same mild tone. We
give up the external demonstration, the brute violence, but cannot part with the essence
or principle of hostility. We do not tread upon the poor little animal in question (that seems
barbarous and pitiful!) but we regard it with a sort of mystic horror and superstitious
loathing. It will ask another hundred years of fine writing and hard thinking to cure us of
the prejudice and make us feel towards this ill-omened tribe with something of "the milk
of human kindness," instead of their own shyness and venom.

Nature seems (the more we look into it) made up of antipathies: without something to hate, we should lose the very spring of thought and action. Life would turn to a stagnant pool, were it not ruffled by the jarring interests, the unruly passions, of men. The white streak in our own fortunes is brightened (or just rendered visible) by making all around it as dark as possible; so the rainbow paints its form upon the cloud. Is it pride? Is it envy? Is it the force of contrast? Is it weakness or malice? But so it is, that there is a secret affinity, a hankering after, evil in the human mind, and that it takes a perverse, but a
fortunate delight in mischief, since it is a never-failing source of satisfaction. Pure good
soon grows insipid, wants variety and spirit. Pain is a bittersweet, wants variety and spirit.
Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust: hatred alone is immortal. Do
we not see this principle at work everywhere? Animals torment and worry one another
without mercy: children kill flies for sport: every one reads the accidents and offences in
a newspaper as the cream of the jest: a whole town runs to be present at a fire, and the
spectator by no means exults to see it extinguished. It is better to have it so, but it
diminishes the interest; and our feelings take part with our passions rather than with our
understandings. Men assemble in crowds, with eager enthusiasm, to witness a tragedy:
but if there were an execution going forward in the next street, as Mr. Burke observes, the
theater would be left empty. A strange cur in a village, an idiot, a crazy woman, are set
upon and baited by the whole community. Public nuisances are in the nature of public
benefits. How long did the Pope, the Bourbons, and the Inquisition keep the people of
England in breath, and supply them with nicknames to vent their spleen upon! Had they
done us any harm of late? No: but we have always a quantity of superfluous bile upon the
stomach, and we wanted an object to let it out upon. How loth were we to give up our pious
belief in ghosts and witches, because we liked to persecute the one, and frighten ourselves
to death with the other! It is not the quality so much as the quantity of excitement that we
are anxious about: we cannot bear a state of indifference and ennui: the mind seems to
abhor a vacuum as much as ever nature was supposed to do. Even when the spirit of the
age (that is, the progress of intellectual refinement, warring with our natural infirmities) no
longer allows us to carry our vindictive and head strong humours into effect, we try to
revive them in description, and keep up the old bugbears, the phantoms of our terror and
our hate, in imagination. We burn Guy Fawx in effigy, and the hooting and buffeting and
maltreating that poor tattered figure of rags and straw makes a festival in every village in
England once a year. Protestants and Papists do not now burn one another at the stake:
but we subscribe to new editions of Fox's Book of Martyrs; and the secret of the success
of the Scotch Novels is much the same-they carry us back to the feuds, the heart-burnings, the havoc, the dismay, the wrongs, and the revenge of a barbarous age and people-to the rooted prejudices and deadly animosities of sects and parties in politics and religion, and of contending chiefs and clans in war and intrigue. We feel the full force of the spirit of hatred with all of them in turn. As we read, we throw aside the trammels of civilization, the flimsy veil of humanity. "Off, you lendings!" The wild beast resumes its sway within us, we feel like hunting animals, and as the hound starts in his sleep and rushes on the chase in fancy the heart rouses itself in its native lair, and utters a wild cry of joy, at being restored once more to freedom and lawless unrestrained impulses. Every one has his full swing, or goes to the Devil his own way. Here are no Jeremy Bentham Panopticons, none of Mr. Owen's impassable Parallelograms1 (Rob Roy would have spurred and poured a thousand curses on them), no long calculations of self-interest -- the will takes its instant way to its object, as the mountain-torrent flings itself over the precipice: the greatest possible good of each individual consists in doing all the mischief he can to his neighbour: that is charming, and finds a sure and sympathetic chord in every breast! So Mr. Irving2, the celebrated preacher, has rekindled the old, original, almost exploded hell-fire in the aisles of the Caledonian Chapel, as they introduce the real water of the New River at Sadler's Wells, to the delight and astonishment of his fair audience. 'Tis pretty, though a plague, to sit and peep into the pit of Tophet, to play at snap-dragon with flames and brimstone (it gives a smart electrical shock, a lively filip to delicate constitutions), and to see Mr. Irving, like a huge Titan, looking as grim and swarthy as if he had to forge tortures for all the damned! What a strange being man is! Not content with doing all he can to vex and hurt his fellows here, "upon this bank and shoal of time," where one would think there were heartaches, pain, disappointment, anguish, tears, sighs, and groans enough, the bigoted maniac takes him to the top of the high peak of school divinity to hurl him down the
yawning gulf of penal fire; his speculative malice asks eternity to wreak its infinite spite in,
and calls on the Almighty to execute its relentless doom! The cannibals burn their enemies
and eat them in good-fellowship with one another: meed Christian divines cast those who
differ from them but a hair's-breadth, body and soul into hellfire for the glory of God and
the good of His creatures! It is well that the power of such persons is not co-ordinate with
their wills: indeed it is from the sense of their weakness and inability to control the opinions
of others, that they thus "outdo termagant," and endeavour to frighten them into conformity
by big words and monstrous denunciations.

The pleasure of hating, like a poisonous mineral, eats into the heart of religion, and
turns it to rankling spleen and bigotry; it makes patriotism an excuse for carrying fire,
pestilence, and famine into other lands: it leaves to virtue nothing but the spirit of
censoriousness, and a narrow, jealous, inquisitorial watchfulness over the actions and
motives of others. What have the different sects, creeds, doctrines in religion been but so many pretexts set up for men to wrangle, to quarrel, to tear one another in pieces about, like a target as a mark to shoot at? Does any one suppose that the love of country in an
Englishman implies any friendly feeling or disposition to serve another bearing the same
name? No, it means only hatred to the French or the inhabitants of any other country that
we happen to be at war with for the time. Does the love of virtue denote any wish to
discover or amend our own faults? No, but it atones for an obstinate adherence to our own
vices by the most virulent intolerance to human frailties. This principle is of a most
universal application. It extends to good as well as evil: if it makes us hate folly, it makes
us no less dissatisfied with distinguished merit. If it inclines us to resent the wrongs of
others, it impels us to be as impatient of their prosperity. We revenge injuries: we repay
benefits with ingratitude. Even our strongest partialities and likings soon take this turn. "That which was luscious as locusts, anon becomes bitter as coloquintida;" and love and
friendship melt in their own fires. We hate old friends: we hate old books: we hate old
opinions; and at last we come to hate ourselves.

I have observed that few of those whom I have formerly known most intimate,
continue on the same friendly footing, or combine the steadiness with the warmth of
attachment. I have been acquainted with two or three knots of inseparable companions,
who saw each other "six days in the week;" that have been broken up and dispersed. I
have quarrelled with almost all my old friends' (they might say this is owing to my bad
temper, but) they have also quarrelled with one another. What is become of "that set of
whist-players," celebrated by Elia in his notable Epistle to Robert Southey, Esq.3 (and now
I think of it - that I myself have celebrated in this very volume4) "that for so many years
called Admiral Burney friend?" They are scattered, like last year's snow. Some of them are
dead, or gone to live at a distance, or pass one another in the street like strangers, or if
they stop to speak, do it as coolly and try to cut one another as soon as possible. Some
of us have grown rich, others poor. Some have got places under Government, others a
niche in the Quarterly Review. Some of us have dearly earned a name in the world; whilst
others remain in their original privacy. We despise the one, and envy and are glad to
mortify the other. Times are changed; we cannot revive our old feelings; and we avoid the
sight, and are uneasy in the presence of, those who remind us of our infirmity, and put us
upon an effort at seeming cordiality which embarrasses ourselves, and does not impose
upon our quondam associates. Old friendships are like meats served up repeatedly, cold,
comfortless, and distasteful. The stomach turns against them. Either constant intercourse
and familiarity breed weariness and contempt; if we meet again after an interval of
absence, we appear no longer the same. One is too wise, another too foolish, for us; and
we wonder we did not find this out before. We are disconcerted and kept in a state of
continual alarm by the wit of one, or tired to death of the dullness of another. The good
things of the first (besides leaving strings behind them) by repetition grow stale, and lose
their startling effect; and the insipidity of the last becomes intolerable. The most amusing
or instructive companion is best like a favorite volume, that we wish after a time to lay upon the shelf; but as our friends are not willing to be laid there, this produces a
misunderstanding and ill-blood between us. Or if the zeal and integrity of friendship is not
abated, or its career interrupted by any obstacle arising out of its own nature, we look out
for other subjects of complaint and sources of dissatisfaction. We begin to criticize each
other's dress, looks, general character. "Such a one is a pleasant fellow, but it is a pity he
sits so late!" Another fails to keep his appointments, and that is a sore that never heals.
We get acquainted with some fashionable young men or with a mistress, and wish to
introduce our friend; but be is awkward and a sloven, the interview does not answer, and
this throws cold water on our intercourse. Or he makes himself obnoxious to opinion; and
we shrink from our own convictions on the subject as an excuse for not defending him. All
or any of these causes mount up in time to a ground of coolness or irritation; and at last
they break out into open violence as the only amends we can make ourselves for
suppressing them so long, or the readiest means of banishing recollections of former
kindness so little compatible with our present feelings. We may try to tamper with the
wounds or patch up the carcase of departed friendship; but the one will hardly bear the
handling, and the other is not worth the trouble of embalming! The only way to be
reconciled to old friends is to part with them for good: at a distance we may chance to be
thrown back ( in a waking dream) upon old times and old feelings: or at any rate we should
not think of renewing our intimacy, till we have fairly spit our spite or said, thought, and felt
all the ill we can of each other. Or if we can pick a quarrel with some one else, and make
him the scape-goat, this is an excellent contrivance to heal a broken bone. I think I must
be friends with Lamb again, since he has written that magnanimous Letter to Southey,
and told him a piece of his mind! I don't know what it is that attaches me to H---so much,
except that he and I, whenever we meet, sit in judgment on another set of old friends, and
"carve them as a dish fit for the Gods". There with L [Leigh Hunt], John Scott, Mrs.
[Montagu], whose dark raven locks make a picturesque background to our discourse, B---,
who is grown fat, and is, they say, married, R[ickman]; these had all separated long ago,
and their foibles are the common link that holds us together.5 We do not affect to condole
or whine over their follies; we enjoy, we laugh at them, till we are ready to burst our sides,
"sans intermissions for hours by the dial." We serve up a course of anecdotes, traits,
master-strokes of character, and cut and hack at them till we are weary. Perhaps some
of them are even with us. For my own part, as I once said, I like a friend the better for
having faults that one can talk about. "Then," said Mrs. [Montagu], " you will cease to be
a philanthropist!" Those in question were some of the choice-spirits of the age, not "fellows
of no mark or likelihood'; and we so far did them justice: but it is well they did not hear what
we sometimes said of them. I care little what any one says of me, particularly behind my
back, and in the way of critical and analytical discussion: it is looks of dislike and scorn that
I answer with the worst venom of my pen. The expression of the face wounds me more
than the expressions of the tongue. If I have in one instance mistaken this expression, or
resorted to this remedy where I ought not, I am sorry for it. But the face was too fine over
which it mantled, and I am too old to have misunderstood it!...I sometimes go up to -----'s;
and as often as I do, resolve never to go again. I do not find the old homely welcome. The
ghost of friendship meets me at the door, and sits with me all dinner-time. They have got
a set of fine notions and new acquaintances. Allusions to past occurrences are thought
trivial, nor is it always safe to touch upon more general subjects. M. does not begin as he
formerly did every five minutes, "Fawcett used to say," &c. That topic is something worn.
The girls are grown up, and have a thousand accomplishments. I perceive there is a
jealousy on both sides. They think I give myself airs, and I fancy the same of them. Every
time I am asked, "If I do not think Mr. Washington Irving a very fine writer?" I shall not go
again till I receive an invitation for Christmas Day in company with Mr. Liston. The only
intimacy I never found to flinch or fade was a purely intellectual one. There was none of
the cant of candour in it, none of the whine of mawkish sensibility. Our mutual
acquaintance were considered merely as subjects of conversation and knowledge, not all
of affection. We regarded them no more in our experiments than "mice in an air-pump:"
or like malefactors, they were regularly cut down and given over to the dissecting-knife.
We spared neither friend nor foe. We sacrificed human infirmities at the shrine of truth.
The skeletons of character might be seen, after the juice was extracted, dangling in the air
like flies in cobwebs; or they were kept for future inspection in some refined acid. The
demonstration was as beautiful as it was new. There is no surfeiting on gall: nothing keeps
so well as a decoction of spleen. We grow tired of every thing but turning others into
ridicule, and congratulating ourselves on their defects.

We take a dislike to our favourite books, after a time, for the same reason. We cannot read
the same works for ever. Our honey-moon, even though we wed the Muse, must come to
an end; and is followed by indifference, if not by disgust. There are some works, those
indeed that produce the most striking effect at first by novelty and boldness of outline, that
will not bear reading twice: others of a less extravagant character, and that excite and
repay attention by a greater nicety of details, have hardly interest enough to keep alive our
continued enthusiasm. The popularity of the most successful writers operates to wean us
from them, by the cant and fuss that is made about them, by hearing their names
everlastingly repeated, and by the number of ignorant and indiscriminate admirers they
draw after them: - we as little like to have to drag others from their unmerited obscurity, lest
we should be exposed to the charge of affectation and singularity of taste. There is
nothing to be said respecting an author that all the world have made up their minds about:
it is a thankless as well as hopeless task to recommend one that nobody has ever heard
of. To cry up Shakespear as the god of our idolatry, seems like a vulgar national prejudice:
to take down a volume of Chaucer, or Spenser, or Beaumont and Fletcher, or Ford, or
Marlowe, has very much the look of pedantry and egotism. I confess it makes me hate the
very name of Fame and Genius, when works like these are "gone into the wastes of time,"
while each successive generation of fools is busily employed in reading the trash of the
day, and women of fashion gravely join with their waiting-maids in discussing the
preference between the Paradise Lost and Mr. Moore's Loves of the Angels. I was
pleased the other day on going into a shop to ask, "If they had any of the Scotch Novels?"
to be told - "That they had just sent out the last, Sir Andrew Wylie!" - Mr. Galt will also be
pleased with this answer! The reputation of some books is raw and unaired: that of others
is worm-eaten and mouldy. Why fix our affections on that which we cannot bring ourselves
to have faith in, or which others have long ceased to trouble themselves about? I am half
afraid to look into Tom Jones, lest it should not answer my expectations at this time of day;
and if it did not, I would certainly be disposed to fling it into the fire, and never look into
another novel while I lived. But surely, it may be said, there are some works that, like
nature, can never grow old; and that must always touch the imagination and passions
alike! Or there are passages that seem as if we might brood over them all our lives, and
not exhaust the sentiments of love and admiration they excite: they become favourites, and
we are fond of them to a sort of dotage. Here is one:

---"Sitting in my window
Printing my thoughts in lawn, I saw a god,
I thought (but it was you), enter our gates;
My blood flew out and back again, as fast
As I had puffed it forth and sucked it in
Like breath; then was I called away in haste
To entertain you: never was a man
Thrust from a sheepcote to a sceptre, raised
So high in thoughts as I; you left a kiss
Upon these lips then, which I mean to keep
From you for ever. I did hear you talk
Far above singing!"

A passage like this, indeed, leaves a taste on the palate like nectar, and we seem in
reading it to sit with the Gods at their golden tables: but if we repeat it often in ordinary
moods, it loses its flavour, becomes vapid, "the wine of poetry is drank, and but the lees
remain." Or, on the other hand, if we call in the air of extraordinary circumstances to set
it off to advantage, as the reciting it to a friend, or after having our feelings excited by a
long walk in some romantic situation, or while we

---"play with Amaryllis in the shade,
Or with the tangles of Neaera's hair"---

we afterwards miss the accompanying circumstances, and instead of transferring the
recollection of them to the favourable side, regret what we have lost, and strive in vain to
bring back "the irrevocable hour" - wondering in some instances how we survive it, and at
the melancholy blank that is left behind! The pleasure rises to its height in some moment
of calm solitude or intoxicating sympathy, declines ever after, and from the comparison and
conscious falling-off, leaves rather a sense of satiety and irksomeness behind it... "Is it the
same in pictures?" I confess it is, with all but those from Titian's hand. I don't know why,
but an air breathes from his landscapes, pure, refreshing, as if it came from other years;
there is a look in his faces that never passes away. I saw one the other day. Amidst the
heartless desolation and glittering finery of Fonthill, there is a portfolio of the Dresden
Gallery. It opens, and a young female head looks from it; a child, yet woman grown; with
an air of rustic innocence and the graces of a princess, her eyes like those of doves, the
lips about to open, a smile of pleasure dimpling the whole face, the jewels sparkling in her
crisped hair, her youthful shape compressed in a rich antique dress, as the bursting leaves
contain the April buds! Why do I not call up this image of gentle sweetness, and place it
as a perpetual barrier between mischance and me? - It is because pleasure asks a greater
effort of the mind to support it than pain; and we turn after a little idle dalliance from what
we love to what we hate!

As to my old opinions, I am heartily sick of them. I have reason, for they have deceived
me sadly. I was taught to think, and I was willing to believe, that genius was not a bawd,
that virtue was not a mask, that liberty was not a name, that love had its seat in the human
heart. Now I would care little if these words were struck out of the dictionary, or if I had
never heard them. They are become to my ears a mockery and a dream. Instead of
patriots and friends of freedom, I see nothing but the tyrant and the slave, the people linked
with kings to rivet on the chains of despotism and superstition. I see folly join with knavery,
and together make up public spirit and public opinions. I see the insolent Tory, the blind
Reformer, the coward Whig! If mankind had wished for what is right, they might have had
it long ago. The theory is plain enough; but they are prone to mischief, "to every good work
reprobate." I have seen all that had been done by the mighty yearnings of the spirit and
intellect of men, "of whom the world was not worthy," and that promised a proud opening
to truth and good through the vista of future years, undone by one man, with just
glimmering of understanding enough to feel that he was a king, but not to comprehend how
he could be king of a free people! I have seen this triumph celebrated by poets, the friends
of my youth and the friends of men, but who were carried away by the infuriate tide that,
setting in from a throne, bore down every distinction of right reason before it; and I have
seen all those who did not join in applauding this insult and outrage on humanity
proscribed, hunted down (they and their friends made a byword of), so that it has become
an understood thing that no one can live by his talents or knowledge who is not ready to
prostitute those talents and that knowledge to betray his species, and prey upon his fellow-
man. "This was some time a mystery: but the time gives evidence of it." The echoes of
liberty had awakened once more in Spain, and the mornings of human hope dawned
again: but that dawn has been overcast by the foul breath of bigotry, and those reviving
sounds stifled by fresh cries from the time-rent towers of the Inquisition - man yielding (as
it is fit he should) first to brute force, but more to the innate perversity and dastard spirit of
his own nature which leaves no room for farther hope or disappointment. And England,
that arch-reformer, that heroic deliverer, that mouther about liberty, and tool of power,
stands gaping by, not feeling the blight and mildew coming over it, nor its very bones crack
and turn to a paste under the grasp and circling folds of this new monster, Legitimacy! In
private life do we not see hypocrisy, servility, selfishness, folly, and impudence succeed,
while modesty shrinks from the encounter, and merit is trodden under foot? How often is
"the rose plucked from the forehead of a virtuous love to plant a blister there!" What
chance is there of the success of real passion? What certainty of its continuance? Seeing
all this as I do, and unravelling the web of human life into its various threads of meanness,
spite, cowardice, want of feeling, and want of understanding, of indifference towards
others, and ignorance of ourselves, - seeing custom prevail over all excellence, itself giving
way to infamy - mistaken as I have been in my public and private hopes, calculating others
from myself, and calculating wrong; always disappointed where I placed most reliance; the
dupe of friendship, and the fool of love; - have I not reason to hate and to despise myself?
Indeed I do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough.

[1] Panopticons was the name given by Bentham to a proposed form of prison of circular shape having cells built round and fully exposed towards a central well, from which the jail keepers could at all times observe the prisoners. Robert Owen was the first in a line of 19th century socialists who in fact carried out experiments at his cotton mills at New Lanark mill where he erected a block of buildings in the form of a parallelogram to house the workers.

[2] Hazlitt refers to Edward Irving (1792-34), the Scottish divine and mystic who took over the Caledonian Church, Hatton Garden, London, and where he enjoyed a phenomenal success as a preacher.

[3] Lamb's Epistle to Robert Southey, Esq., was published in the London Magazine, Oct. 1823. See my page on Robert Southey.

[4] "On the Conversations of Authors" by Hazlitt and which first appeared in Sep. of 1820, and which was in his book of essays, The Plain Speaker (1826).

[5] Hazlitt seems to be referring to most of those who gathered at Lamb's house, c. 1808, more Lamb's friends than Hazlitt's: Captain Burney, Martin, his son; Wm. Ayrton, musician; James White, treasurer at Christ's Hospital; John Rickman, clerk to the speaker; Edward "Ned" Phillips, another clerk and Rickman's successor; Geo. Dyer; Joseph Hume; et al. One could have seen them at the residence of Charles and Mary Lamb where they met every Wednesday night; for discussion, cribbage and whist.